This article by Matt Shipman is published by News. Here is an excerpt:

A new study from North Carolina State University finds that anticipating future stress related to political elections can affect people’s emotional well-being before anything has even happened. But a related study shows that education can help protect people against those stresses – even for individuals who are actively engaged in the political process.

“We know people can feel stress in anticipation of an event, and we know elections can be stressful for people,” says Shevaun Neupert, senior author of both studies and a professor of psychology at NC State. “We wanted to learn more about how much stress people feel leading up to an election, and what factors contribute to that stress. Ultimately, we wanted to get insights that can be used to help people manage these stresses.”

“In the first study, we wanted to learn how – if at all – anticipating election stress in the near future affected people’s emotional well-being in the moment,” says Xianghe Zhu, first author of that study and a postdoctoral researcher at Florida State University who worked on the research while a graduate student at NC State. “Does anything moderate that anticipated stress and how people respond to it?”

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